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Monday, December 13, 2010

Episode 9 or Why Mass Effect 3 will be Awesome

First and foremost...THANK YOU READERS! This blog has simply blown up this past week. I'm not sure what is going on, but keep it up! I was figuring on being happy with 500 hits by the end of the year, but damn! Over one thousand! Better than I could have hoped. Now if only I got paid for this...

And now, a letter:
Dear BioWare,

I love you! So very much! If you were a person, I'd make sweet love to you all night long! You have given us a gift. One that we as gamers were not truly expecting! Mass Effect 3 was a great surprise! I personally wasn't expecting it until at least fall of 2012! But you have deemed us worthy of the final chapter of this uber-trilogy. Again, I love you. So very much.

Love(seriously...ask the wife)
The Irrelevant Gamer

Now that we have that out of the way, we can get down to business! The year of gaming is pretty much at an end. And everyone and their mom is giving out awards, so will we!

ANNOUNCEMENT! Next posting will be the 1st Annual Irrelevant Gaming Awards! Finally, an award show that doesn't matter...wait...

Allrighty then! Let's get on to the review!

CALL OF DUTY BLACK OPS
Black Ops is the latest in the long line of war games. Instead of modern times, or World War 2, like all previous titles, takes place in the 1960's(with one mission taking place in 1945.). It starts off in Cuba during the Bay of Pigs invasion. The campaign is actually a pretty good story, taking about 8 hours. Moving from Cuba to Russia, Vietnam, and beyond. Intense combat and lots of dying await those who try this baby on Veteran mode, which is more intense than Modern Warfare 2. But here's the thing: Nobody buys Call of Duty games for the story! No...it's all about the multi-player. Yeah, it's good. But what do you expect from a multiplayer staple? A few new additions is the wagering system, which is worth checking out. And because it's a Treyarch game, there be zombies! Yes, Nazi zombies are back! There are even a few secret game types which I will not speak of here...they are secret for a reason!

PROS: Realistic combat, fast and furious action. Really good controls.
CONS: Predictable, but all Call of Duty games are. Watch out for Douche-bags online.
GRADE: 8.0

So Mass Effect 3 is coming holiday 2011. That's one year from now. That may seem like a lot of time to you and me, but in game design terms, that's a really short time. Alan Wake took 5 years! So, it's pretty obvious that BioWare has been hard at work on this title for sometime. In the past 5 years, BioWare has put out 4 major titles: Jade Empire, Mass Effect, Dragon Age: Origins, and Mass Effect 2. (Not to mention the oft-overlooked Sonic: Dark Brotherhood on the DS.) They also dropped the massive Dragon Age expansion: Awakenings this year. Next year looks to be about the biggest year ever! Starting with Dragon Age 2, Star Wars: The Old Republic mmorpg, and ending with the crown jewel: Mass Effect 3.

Mass Effect has been called the modern space opera. It's certainly been better than Star Wars Episodes I-III. The culmination of this massive story arc can only lead to Commander Shepard leading not just a crack team of space commandos, but an whole army based entirely of consequences of your decisions in the three games. Did you kill the Rachni queen? Is Werx even alive? What about the Collector base? All of these will be weighed in. Over 1,000 variables will be imported from Mass Effect 1 & 2. No other game has taken your decisions and ran like the Mass Effect games. The best thing about these games: It's your game. Everyone else's is different! Your choices, your team, your Shepard...it's all on you. So what's next Commander? The choice is yours.